919534

research-article20202020
SGOXXX10.1177/2158244020919534SAGE OpenManor

Original Research

SAGE Open

“Grow Old Along With Me”: Robert

April-June 2020: 1­–9
© The Author(s) 2020
DOI: 10.1177/2158244020919534
https://doi.org/10.1177/2158244020919534

Browning’s Conception of Jewish Old Age journals.sagepub.com/home/sgo

Gal Manor1

Abstract
Robert Browning often explored the concepts of old age and dying in his poems, and surprisingly enough, some of these
most striking poems use Hebraic sources as intertexts. This article will explore Robert Browning’s idea of old age as it is
conveyed in “Rabbi Ben Ezra,” “Pisgah Sights,” and “Jochanan Hakkadosh,” three poems in which Browning turns to Hebrew
sources to explore philosophical and mystical narratives of aging. Written against the emerging Victorian conception of the
elderly subject, these poems merge two forms of Victorian Otherness—Judaism and old age—so as to create an alternative
and celebratory vision of the last stage of life. These representations of old age also reflect Robert Browning’s biographical
old age, which introduced long-awaited popularity and critical acclaim, and the evolution of his favorite form, the dramatic
monologue.

Keywords
literature, humanities, arts and humanities, social sciences, theology, religious studies, Victorian poetry, old age, poetry,
religion, mysticism, moral and religious

Studies of the Victorian conception of old age have gained Browning’s ideas on old age as they are conveyed in
popularity in the last decade or so, reflecting the birth of a “Rabbi Ben Ezra” (1864), “Pisgah Sights” (1876), and
new topic in critical studies focusing on the representation of “Jochanan Hakkadosh” (1883), three dramatic monologues
senescence in literature (Mangum, 2011). Yet Robert in which Browning turns to Jewish sources to explore phil-
Browning’s exceptional conception of old age, inspired by osophical and mystical alternatives to the emerging
Jewish mysticism, has been almost completely ignored, even Victorian conception of old age which focused on physical
though these lines from his dramatic monologue “Rabbi Ben and mental decline (Mangum, 1999). Thus, Browning’s
Ezra” (1864) are probably some of the best-known lines on conception of Jewish old age is a merger of two evolving
old age in the history of English literature: tropes of “otherness”: the elderly subject, on the one hand,
and the Jewish male subject, on the other. The literary rep-
Grow old along with me! resentations of both these tropes were undergoing changes
as a result of the growing visibility of both Jewish and
The best is yet to be, elderly subjects in Victorian culture, and the consequent
struggle of both of these groups for rights in the cultural
The last of life, for which the first was made: and political arenas.
Karen Chase’s (2009) seminal study of the conception of
Our times are in His hand old age in Victorian Britain draws on various sources such as
newspapers, magazines, parliamentary debates, and literature
Who saith “A whole I planned,
to corroborate her claim of the “invention of the elderly sub-
ject” in the second half the 19th century, a process culminating
Youth shows but half; trust God: see all, nor be afraid!”1 (Vol. I,
p. 781, Lines 1–6)
in the Pension Bill of 1908 (p. 276). As a result of the increas-
ing number of elderly people requiring care, the abundance of
Yet this is hardly Robert Browning’s only comment on old
age: Many of his poems deal with elderly characters sum- 1
Levinsky College of Education, Tel Aviv, Israel
ming up their lives and facing death, and surprisingly Corresponding Author:
enough, three of these most striking poems use Hebraic Gal Manor, Levinsky College of Education, Tel Aviv 6937808, Israel.
sources as intertexts. This essay will explore Robert Email: galmanormail@gmail.com

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2 SAGE Open

images of aging bodies, and the emerging discipline of geron- presence of a diseased body” (Sicher & Weinhouse, 2012,
tology, Victorian culture acknowledges the emergence of old p. 1), reminiscent, perhaps, of some of the attitudes toward
age as “a distinct stage of life” and a recognized site of social, the aged. Thus, Browning’s insistence on mature Jewish
medical, and political discourse (Zwierlein et al., 2013, p. 1). speakers seems to undermine the Victorian narratives of
The literary representations of old age often reflected the sense identity and race revolving around “the Jewish question,”
that the old have become a burden on the younger generation which reentered the British political discourse in the 1870s
and in the last quarter of a century were also influenced by the (Cheyette, 1995, p. 53) and which Browning, a self-
image of the aging Queen Victoria, an image tinted by pro- confessed liberal and philo-Semite (Woolford & Karlin,
tracted grieving and diminishment of power (Chase, 2009). 1996, pp. 157–158), might have found distasteful.
The construction of this novel category of old age obvi-
ously converged with other social categories, such as gender,
religion, ethnicity, and class, some of which contained posi-
Browning and Judaism
tive representations of old age as well. The anxieties brought Browning’s interest in Judaism began in childhood, when he
about by old age, mainly the fear of helplessness and dying, encountered texts of Jewish mysticism in his father’s exten-
also manifest themselves in an exploration of other, exoti- sive and eclectic library, which contained approximately
cized, or transgressive images of senescence. One example 6,000 volumes (Woolford & Karlin, 2007, pp. 5–6). As part
of a crossing of the accepted Victorian borders of old age is of his unusual middle-class education,3 he became a vora-
Robert Browning’s positive construction of senescence, cious reader of the quaint, mystical, and cryptic texts in his
inspired by Hebrew sources, which merges two forms of home library, which included, among other things, works by
“otherness”: Jewishness and old age. Against the backdrop Renaissance magicians and Jewish philosophers. Browning’s
of the mostly negative literary representations of old age pro- father compiled a couple of volumes which comprise a com-
duced by his contemporaries (Woolford et al., 2010, p. 651), plete nomenclature of the Old Testament and one which
Robert Browning constructed a vivid and affirmative image reflects not only his knowledge of the Bible but also an
of Jewish old age. acquaintance with post-biblical Jewish literature (Berlin-
Browning’s images of Jewish old age are contrasted not Lieberman, 1934, pp. 9–10). Robert Browning studied
only with representations of old age in contemporary poetry Hebrew from 1837 to 1840 and returned to it in the 1870s,
but also with representations of Jewish masculinity in after Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s death. Elizabeth Barrett
Victorian culture, most of which contain negative and intimi- Browning also studied Hebrew and knew it well enough to
dating traits such as avarice and malevolence (Valman, 2011, read the entire Bible in the original language (Scheinberg,
pp. 149–150). Scrivener (2011) differentiates between the 2002, p. 70). Both Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning
stereotype of the villainous male Jew and “the benevolent incorporated Hebrew into their poems, mostly with a biblical
Jew of Romantic writing . . . who is invariably old and sexu- reference, and this practice intensified with Browning’s col-
ally inactive, in effect neutered,” a romantic image correlat- lections published in his old age: Jocoseria (1883) and
ing with Browning’s Jewish old men (p. 6). This is contrasted Ferishtah’s Fancies (1884). As a result of this interest in
with the obvious Victorian example of a malicious old Jew in Jewish subjects, a rumor concerning Browning’s “Jewish
the shape of Dickens’s Fagin, and a less obvious one such as blood” emerged, manifesting itself during his life, but par-
Ebenezer Scrooge, who holds a profession of money-lender ticularly posthumously, in several biographies which bring
as well as a “pointed nose” (Dickens, 1858, p. 2). Grossman forth lengthy arguments meant to deny this claim (Manor,
(1996) has convincingly shown that Ebenezer Scrooge, 2013). These narratives about Browning’s “Jewishness”
despite not being explicitly labeled as Jewish, in fact embod- divulge the Victorian anxiety revolving around Jewish iden-
ies all the traits of the stereotyped Jew, and even after his tity, disguised or exposed, as well as Browning’s rebellious
“conversion” remains in “isolation” (pp. 51–52). Scrooge’s playfulness with these Jewish images, despite the cultural
first name, Ebenezer, vaguely resembles that of Ben Ezra,2 unease they generated.
and indeed, both derive from the same root and have the
same meaning in Hebrew: both “Eben” and “Ben” mean “Rabbi Ben Ezra”: “The Last of Life,
“son of,” and Ezer and Ezra mean “help” in Hebrew. “Rabbi
Ben Ezra” of 1864 could thus be a foil containing Browning’s
For Which the First Was Made”
intertextual reference to the notorious image of Ebenezer “Rabbi Ben Ezra” is not Browning’s first reference to Jewish
Scrooge, published 21 years earlier. This ambivalent trope of themes. These appear in some of his early works as well, as
an old Jewish man becomes all the more contentious from in Bells and Pomegranates, a hermetic title based on a
the late 1870s onward as a result of the growing number of Rabbinical exegesis of the garment of Aaron, which was
Jewish immigrants of East European origin who immigrated received with dismay by the critics in 1841 (Woolford et al.,
to England (Bar-Yosef & Valman, 2009, pp. 4–5). In the 2010, p. 885). The figure of Ben Ezra himself, the speaker of
19th-century Semitic discourse, most of the representations “Rabbi Ben Ezra,” already appears in Men and Women’s
of Jews in Victorian culture have been likened to “an alien “Holy-Cross Day” of 1855. Rabbi Ben Ezra was an eminent
Manor 3

12th-century Jewish scholar, born in Spain, who wrote com- about old age already deviates from the mostly grim Victorian
mentaries on the Bible as well as some poetry. His manu- perception of this stage of life: “the best is yet to be” and “the
scripts, written in Hebrew and translated to Latin, could be last of life, for which the first was made.” The notion that life
accessible to Browning in the British Museum, as well as in is divided into two parts—the first and the last—derives
the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris and the Vatican Library from Ibn-Ezra, as is the phrase “Our times are in his hand,”
in Rome (Woolford et al., 2010, pp. 650–651). One of his almost an exact translation of the source (Berlin-Lieberman,
central themes has to do with the dialectic of body and soul, 1934, pp. 40–41). Yet there is one alteration made by
neither embracing celibacy nor rejecting sensuality, but Browning: The original sentence is in the first-person singu-
rather recommending a merger of both body and soul in the lar, whereas in Browning’s poem it becomes the first-person
acquisition of knowledge and wisdom (Woolford et al., 2010, plural, in accordance with Browning’s construction of Jewish
pp. 650–651). old age as characterized by the comforting nature of a collec-
“Holy-Cross Day” relates the Papal decree of 1584 by tive identity. Browning ends the first stanza with the follow-
Pope Paul IV which limited Jews to life in a ghetto and ing exclamation:
forced them to hear a Christian sermon once a week. While
reluctantly hearing the sermon, they chant Ben Ezra’s “Song Youth shows but half; trust god: see all nor be afraid!
of Death” (Line 66). This is a fictional narrative (Woolford
et al., 2010, p. 549), which prophesizes the redemption of the This acknowledgment of the fear generated by old age is
Jews through conversion and a return to “the Pleasant land” followed by a narrative which serves as an antidote to feel-
(Line 120): ings of anxiety and despair, common in Victorian
narratives:
For Rabbi Ben Ezra, the night he died,
For thence,—a paradox
Called sons and sons’ sons to his side,
Which comforts while it mocks,—
And spoke, “This world has been harsh and strange;
Shall life succeed in that it seems to fail:
Something is wrong: there needeth a change.
What I aspired to be,
But what, or where? at the last or first?
And was not, comforts me:
In one point only we sin, at worst . . . (Vol. I, p. 708, Lines
67–72) A brute I might have been, but would not sink i’ the scale. (Vol.
I, p. 782, Lines 37–42)
On his deathbed, Ben Ezra acknowledges that he failed at
“A brute I might have been” seems to reflect Browning’s
“one point,” a failure which later in the poem is revealed to
construing of the Darwinian narrative as a divinely spurred
be the renunciation of Jesus. Thus, the poem is one which
process of improvement, as he writes in a letter to F. J.
ends with a conversion to Christianity and a reinstatement of
Furnivall in 1881:
Jews in the land of Israel as part of the narrative of Christian
eschatology regarding the Second Coming (Ragussis, 1995). In reality, all that seems proved in Darwin’s schemes was a
This early image of the dying Ben Ezra already consists of conception familiar to me from the beginning: see in Paracelsus
two elements associated with Browning’s conception of the progressive development from senseless matter to organized,
Jewish old age and dying: the Rabbi is surrounded by “sons, until man’s appearance (Part V) . . . But go back and back . . .
and sons’ sons,” a repetition emphasizing the centrality of the you find (my faith is constant) creative intelligence, acting as
filial relationship and the continuity of the family in the face matter but not resulting from it. (Hood, 1933, pp. 199–200)
of death. The first-person plural “we sin” (Line 72) accentu-
ates this collective identity, which might lessen the fear of The feelings of failure associated with old age are dimin-
dying alone. The second comforting element is one which ished by the narrative of the “scale,” ranging from bestial to
includes a message to the next generation and one which divine, as that mere aspiration toward divinity is proof of the
ought to make some actual change in “[t]his world,” an divine “spark” that “disturbs our clod,” the sensual body
empowering and optimistic vision of continuity and deliver- (Line 28). This comforting paradox of failure and success is
ance prior to one’s demise. paired with another paradox that lies in the center of the
Nine years later, Browning returns to Ben Ezra, but this poem, that of the soul and the flesh. In the poem, Browning
time he relinquishes the conversion narrative and relies emphasizes the spiritual advantages of old age in relation to
merely on the Old Testament, Ibn-Ezra’s commentaries and the Jewish idea of the marriage of “flesh” and “soul,” a con-
poems, and his own inventions. His preliminary statement cept which dominates Jewish thought and is contrasted with
4 SAGE Open

the Christian notion of the soul warring against the body The new wine’s foaming flow,
(Finney, 2016, p. 2). Ibn-Ezra’s commentary on the issue of
body and soul was that the soul descends into the body so as The master’s lips a-glow!
to learn about the human experience and returns to God after
the demise of the body: Thou, heaven’s consummate cup, what needst thou with earth’s
wheel? (Vol. I, p. 787, Lines 175–180)
Let us not always say
The old body, represented in Victorian culture as site of anxi-
“Spite of this flesh to-day ety and disease, becomes “heaven’s consummate cup”—and
this acceptance of the sensual experience of the aging body
I strove, made head, gained ground upon the whole!” imbued with the spark of knowledge yields Browning’s posi-
tion of optimism and faith associated with his conception of
As the bird wings and sings, Jewish old age.

Let us cry “All good things

“Pisgah Sights”: Reconstructing
Are ours, nor soul helps flesh more, now, than flesh helps soul!” Moses’s Old Age
(Vol. I, p. 783, Lines 67–72) “Pisgah Sights,” a poem published in Pacchiarotto, and
How He Worked in Distemper in 1877 when Browning was
Browning returns to Ibn-Ezra’s idea of the marriage of body 64, reveals his lifelong interest in the figure of the biblical
and soul in the final metaphor of the Potter’s wheel, based on Moses. There are 14 direct references to Moses in
a biblical allusion, primarily to Isaiah 64:8, but also to Browning’s work, and many more indirect ones such as the
Jeremiah and Romans: reference to the burning bush in Browning’s “Prologue” to
Asolando (1889), written a couple of months before the
But now, O LORD, thou art our father; we are the clay, and thou poet’s death. In his references to Moses before 1876,
our potter; and we all are the work of thy hand.
Browning, as does Elizabeth Barrett Browning in Aurora
Leigh, represents him as a trope for the poet (Scheinberg,
This metaphor is used to reply to Edward Fitzgerald’s pessi-
2002, p. 91) mediating between God and humanity despite
mism and hedonism in Fitzgerald’s extremely popular
his doubts and his stammer, both mentioned in Exodus. In
Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (1859), which frequently returns
Sordello (1840, Book III, Lines 790–806), Moses is the
to this metaphor so as to support his “carpe diem” approach.
“true” poet who strikes the rock to give water to the
Browning presents the speaker’s reading of Fitzgerald thus:
Israelites in the desert, unlike the “false” poet who supplies
his readers with illusions. The core of Browning’s fascina-
Ay, note that Potter’s wheel,
tion with Moses lies with Moses’s complex and intriguing
That metaphor! and feel
character in the Old Testament and in the Jewish and
Christian commentary. Moses is traditionally considered
Why time spins fast, why passive lies our clay,— the most important figure in the Old Testament and the pre-
cursor of Jesus in Christian typology, the only person who
Thou, to whom fools propound, spoke with God “mouth to mouth,” despite his stutter
(Numbers 12:8). Browning’s idea of the poet resembles
When the wine makes its round, Moses’s predicament: divine knowledge, on the one hand,
and the inability of language to represent it, on the other. In
“Since life fleets, all is change; the Past gone, seize to-day!” a letter responding to Ruskin’s criticism of the abstruseness
(Vol. I, p. 786, Lines 151–156) of Men and Women in 1855, Browning writes,

The speaker’s rejection of this approach is based on Ibn- I know that I don’t make out my conception by my language, all
Ezra’s idea that the aging body, rather than being perceived poetry being a putting the infinite within the finite. (Roberts,
as corrupted and decayed, contains the knowledge which 2005, p. 691)
transports it to the heavenly sphere:
Thus, Moses embodies the difficulty of the poet as
Look not thou down but up! Browning conceives it in both his poems and his correspon-
dence: the human frailties of language, the aspiration toward
To uses of a cup, the divine, and the tumultuous relationship with the readers.
In “Pisgah Sights,” Browning turns his focus to
The festal board, lamp’s flash and trumpet’s peal, Deuteronomy 34:1–4, in which Moses, before his death,
Manor 5

views the promised land from a summit (Pisgah in Hebrew) Sage our desistence!
but is not allowed to enter it because of his failure to believe
that water will emerge from the rock in Numbers 20:1–13. Rough-smooth let globe be,
The term “Pisgah Sight” was a commonplace in Evangelical
hymns, and by the end of the 18th century signified the dying Mixed—man’s existence!
moments of a true believer, associated with divine revelation
(Landow, 1980, p. 207). Browning’s representation of Moses Man—wise and foolish,
becomes more interpretive in “Pisgah Sights”: He questions
Lover and scorner,
the accepted reading of the biblical Moses and begins to
question and explore the myth of Moses to recreate Moses’s
Docile and mulish—
old age, presenting it as reconcilement rather than failure.
The embracing acceptance of contradictions and the mar-
Keep each his corner!
riage of opposites takes us back to Rabbi Ben Ezra’s paradox
about his own life: “what I aspired to be, / And was not, com- Honey yet gall of it!
forts me”:
There’s the life lying,
OVER the ball of it,
And I see all of it,
Peering and prying,
Only, I’m dying! (Vol. II, p. 443, Lines 1–32)
How I see all of it,
As in “Rabbi Ben Ezra,” Browning ends the poem with a
Life there, outlying!
rounded perception of opposites, a concept inspired by 19th-
century philosophers and writers, which recurs in Browning’s
Roughness and smoothness,
works and letters (Karlin, 1993, p. 20). The reconciliation of
Shine and defilement,
opposites is an integral part of Browning’s fantasy of stoic
old age—untroubled by ambition or by the strife and despair
Grace and uncouthness: he associates with it:

One reconcilement. Could I but live again

Orbed as appointed, Twice my life over,

Sister with brother Would I once strive again?

Joins, ne’er disjointed Would not I cover

One from the other. Quietly all of it—

All’s lend-and-borrow; Greed and ambition—

Good, see, wants evil, So, from the pall of it,

Joy demands sorrow, Pass to fruition?

Angel weds devil! “Soft!” I’d say, “Soul mine!

“Which things must—why be?” Three-score and ten years,

Vain our endeavor! Let the blind mole mine

So shall things aye be Digging out deniers!

As they were ever. Let the dazed hawk soar,

“Such things should so be!” Claim the sun’s rights tool

6 SAGE Open

Turf ’tis thy walk’s o’er, Joseph each give the future king part of their lives, just as
Jochanan’s disciples do. Jochanan indeed describes himself
Foliage thy flight’s to.” at the onset of his monologue as “[m]ore luckless than stood
David” when fighting Goliath, and this allusion may indicate
Only a learner, that Browning was acquainted with this source. The poem
begins thus, with an emphasis on the first-person plural:
Quick one or slow one,
“This now, this other story makes amends
Just a discerner,
And justifies our Mishna,” quoth the Jew
I would teach no one.
Aforesaid. “Tell it, learnedest of friends!” (Vol. II, p. 680, Lines
I am earth’s native: 1–3)

No rearranging it! From the very start, the poem underscores communal iden-
tity and a shared source of knowledge, intimating an alterna-
I be creative,
tive concept of subjectivity, in which Browning’s notions of
“love” and “devotion” can cross the borders of an individual
Chopping and changing it? (Vol. II, p. 444, Lines 1–24)
existence and even overcome the loneliness of death. In the
poem, the contribution of “life” by the four members of the
Thus, the poems tell of a relinquishing of the poet’s prophetic
community is made for the sake of communal knowledge
role of mediation between the divine ideas and the audience
and for the attainment of truth, as Jochanan has no “truth” to
which he defines in Paracelsus, Sordello, and The Ring and
reveal on his deathbed and therefore declares himself a “fail-
the Book: a cessation of the poet’s predicament which he
ure” (lines 42, 117).
conceives as inherent to his role. Correspondingly, the form
This notion can be traced back to the Kabbala, as well as
of the poem is relatively simple, with its short lines and a
to George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda published 6 years earlier
predictable ABAB rhyme scheme. This dramatic monologue,
in 1876, which referred to this mystical Jewish text. Browning
written now that Browning is a renowned and successful
had first met Mary Anne Evans on December 12, 1862, when
poet following the publication of The Ring and the Book
he returned to England following Elizabeth Barrett
(1868), opens up for Browning a conceivable narrative of old
Browning’s death (Eliot, 2010, p. 197). They met several
age in which youthful “strife” and ambition are surrendered
times and had a mutual appreciation yet did not become
and a more stoic phase of acceptance begins.
close friends. Eliot’s main source of information for Daniel
Deronda, and one which was available to Browning as well,
“Jochanan Hakkadosh”: The was C. D. Ginsburg’s The Kabbalah: Its Doctrines,
Transmigration of Souls and George Development and Literature published in 1865. In Daniel
Eliot’s Daniel Deronda Deronda, a certain paragraph brings up the exact same theme
Browning chose for “Jochanan Hakkadosh” 6 years later.
Browning’s late collection Jocoseria (1883), published when Mordechai, out of a sense of failure and exclusion, imagines
Browning was 71 years old, takes his hopeful notion of old someone who would continue his work:
age further into the mystical sphere. “Jochanan Hakkadosh”
(1883), transliterated from the Hebrew epithet Jochanan the But he was too sane and generous to attribute his spiritual
Holy One,4 reveals the story of an old Rabbi who is on his banishment solely to the excusable prejudices of others: certain
deathbed, yet four of his disciples decide to grant him part of incapacities of his own had made the sentence of exclusion; and
their lives to prolong his existence. In a letter to Furnivall, on hence it was that his imagination had constructed another man
April 10, 1883, following a misunderstanding of the poem by who would be something more ample than the second soul
an American critic, Browning writes about the poem: bestowed, according to the notion of the Cabbalists, to help out
the insufficient first—who would be a blooming human life,
The whole is a fiction of my own, with just this foundation,— ready to incorporate all that was worthiest in an existence whose
that the old Rabbins fancied that earnest wishing might add to a visible, palpable part was burning itself fast away. (Eliot,
valued life. (Hood, 1933, pp. 216–217) 1876/1984, p. 406)

Berlin-Lieberman (1934, p. 61) traces the story back to the In a later passage, the idea of the joining of souls for the sake
Midrash and the Kabbala, in which King David is allotted of “earthly” accomplishment recurs:
only 3 hr of life, and Adam decides to give David 70 years
out of the thousand given to him. In the Zohar, which is the In the doctrine of the Cabbala, souls are born again and again in
central component of the Kabbala, Abraham, Jacob, and new bodies until they are perfected and purified, and a soul
Manor 7

liberated from a worn-out body may join the fellow soul that 1881 letter to Furnivall which exposes his teleological misin-
needs it, that they may be perfected together, and their earthly terpretation of Darwin.
work accomplished. (Eliot, 1876/1984, p. 461) Another major influence on Browning’s construction of
Jewish old age as an alternative to the Victorian notion is the
Both Mordechai and Jochanan are wasting away and in term “Mashal,” taken from Robert Lowth’s extremely popu-
search for a young soul to help them complete what they lar De Sacra Poesi Hebraeorum (1753) published in English
regard as their spiritual mission. Both missions end in suc- in 1878 as Lectures on the Scared Poetry of the Hebrews.
cess: Mordechai finds a spiritual and physical heir in Daniel Browning owned a copy of this book, which expatiates on
Deronda, and Jochanan experiences an epiphany thanks to the “ineffable sublime” of Hebrew poetry in connection with
the four souls which grant him part of their lives. the term “Mashal” (parable in Hebrew), which according to
The opening lines of “Jochanan Hakkadosh,” which con- Lowth, has three levels of interpretation: “the sententious,
stitute the frame of the poem, introduce an authoritative the figurative, and the sublime” (Lowth, 1787, p. 61). The
speaker, benefiting from received communal knowledge, form of “Jochanan Hakkadosh” corresponds to this defini-
and one who relies on this communal religious identity rather tion and contains numerous parables as well as the three
than on self-revelation in the search for “truth.” The use of parabolic sonnets revolving around Moses which appear at
the first-person plural, “our” (Line 2), also alludes to the the end of the poem. The “Mashal” is both a lie and the
style of the Talmud, in which a group of Jewish scholars are truth—thus containing the acceptance of contradictions and
debating a subject and trying to reach a conclusion. The style paradoxes which Browning assigns to the cognitive faculties
of the Talmud, with which Browning was familiar, (Conway, of old age.
1904, II, p. 21), is intrinsically dialectic: Various rabbis com- Indeed, the poem itself elaborates upon this idea, ending
ment and give examples regarding a certain topic. This dia- with a recounting of Jochanan’s mystical revelation just
logic style must have appealed to Browning, because it has before his death. After presenting several arguments against
similar premises to those behind his dramatic monologues poetry and its false and deluding nature, Jochanan finally has
and resembles the structure of The Ring and the Book (1868). an epiphany:
Another characteristic of the Talmud which might have
appealed to Browning is the mixture of legend and folklore . . . —how seem
side by side with philosophical arguments and pragmatic
laws. The intricacies now, of shade and shine,
“Jochanan Hakkadosh” is itself a mixture of legendary
material with philosophical and logical arguments, a mixture Oppugnant natures—Right and Wrong, we deem
of legend and truisms which the poem shares with other late
works such as Ferishtah’s Fancies and Asolando: Fancies “Irreconcilable? O eyes of mine,
and Facts. As in “Rabbi Ben Ezra” and “Pisgah Sights,” this
notion of the relinquishing of binaries serves as a comforting Freed now of imperfection, ye avail
idea in the face of the Victorian anxieties of old age.
The first line of the poem—“This other story makes To see the whole sight, nor may uncombine
amends”—refers to the Jewish notion of Tikkun, meaning
“mending” in Hebrew, a notion associated with Browning’s “Henceforth what, erst divided, caused you quail —
fantasy of senescence. The “tikkun” is an order of prayer and
study meant to mend failures on the personal and cosmologi- So huge the chasm between the false and true,
cal levels. The source for the idea in the Kabbala, and the
The dream and the reality! . . . (Vol. II, p.705, Lines 745–753)
philosophy behind it that creation, after an initial “breaking
of the vessels” is constantly being mended and improved,
and that prayer and study quicken the mending of the world As in “Pisgah Sights,” the vision of the elderly is character-
(Bloom, 1975, p. 44). On the personal level, the “tikkun” ized by the dissolution of binaries and the stoic perception of
helps bring about absolution and is related to the transmigra- reality beyond the schisms of “true” and “false.” The poem
tion of souls discussed in the Kabbala. Thus, the transmigra- itself is a bold hybrid product of languages: English and
tion of souls can constitute a “tikkun” by helping to have the Hebrew, and genres: legends, dialogues and dramatic mono-
soul’s flaws repaired. This obviously relates to Jochanan’s logues. In “Jochanan Hakkadosh,” Browning reconstructs
prolongation of life by his disciples’ souls, declaring the Moses’s deathbed epiphany, adding an element of communal
poem itself as taking part in the process of “tikkun” and cor- lore and collective identity which is contrasted with Moses’s
responding to Browning’s idea of the general development stark solitude in “Pisgah Sights.”
of humanity and its growth toward perfection, a notion which This type of speaker, who assumes a collective identity in
appears in many poems, such as Paracelsus (V, 750–783) the first-person plural, also appears in the third poem of
and The Ring and the Book (I, 707–719), as well as in an Jocoseria, “Solomon and Balkis,” which is also based on a
8 SAGE Open

Talmudic legend. A third reference to the Talmud in this col- old age rampant in Victorian culture, he espouses the Jewish
lection appears in “Adam, Lilith and Eve,” a dialogic poem notions of the relationship between body and soul and the
comprising three different voices of equal power, based on transmigration of souls, as well as forms such as the “Mashal”
another Talmudic reference. Thus, the Talmud constitutes a to present a vision of old age juxtaposed with its Victorian
major theme in Jocoseria, with three out of the 10 poems of manifestations. Thus, the elderly subject and the Jewish sub-
the collection based on this argumentative and rich tradition. ject, both alienated figures in Victorian culture, are metamor-
Browning’s next collection, Ferishtah’s Fancies (1884), con- phosed into a positive Other embodying Robert Browning’s
tinues the dialogic motif with its mixture of different lan- often idiosyncratic fantasy of Jewish old age.
guages (English, Hebrew, Arabic) and elements of “dream”
and “reality” (“Jochanan Hakkadosh,” Line 753), similar to Declaration of Conflicting Interests
the Talmudic mixture of legend, philosophy, and practicality. The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect
The following publication, Parleyings with Certain People to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
of Importance in their Day (1887), is a collection of dia-
logues, debates, and discussions on topics relevant to Funding
Browning’s thought. Looking back at the stark solipsism of
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, author-
“My Last Duchess” (1842), “Porphyria’s Lover” (1842), ship, and/or publication of this article.
“The Laboratory” (1845), and “Mesmerism”(1855), among
others, the Jewish dialogic style of the Talmud seems to infil- ORCID iD
trate Browning’s late poetry and even to influence his con-
Gal Manor https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9820-2764
ception of the dramatic monologue as it is manifested in his
collections published in the 1880s. In these collections, the
solitary speaker of the early dramatic monologues dissipates Notes
and is superseded by a more dialogic form inspired by the 1. Unless stated otherwise, all quotations of Robert Browning’s
style of the Talmud and characteristic of Browning’s old age. poems are taken from Robert Browning: The Poems (2
Volumes) edited by John Pettigrew (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1888/1981). This collection is based on Browning’s final revi-
Robert Browning’s Old Age sion of his works, published in 16 volumes in 1888–1889.
The optimistic representations of senescence in the three 2. Ebenezer also means “stone of help,” the name of a stone con-
structed by Samuel after a military victory in 1 Samuel 7:12.
poems discussed in this article may reflect Robert Browning’s
3. Robert Browning was a liberal Christian, and his parents
biographical old age. After years of frustration over the identified as dissenters and attended a Nonconformist chapel,
mostly hostile criticism of his poetry, in his last decade of life which meant he could not attend Oxford or Cambridge.
Browning was finally recognized as one of the most unique 4. In Jochanan Hakkadosh, Browning merges three historical
and intriguing voices of the Victorian age. At a relatively late Jewish thinkers who lived and worked in the 1st and 2nd cen-
stage in his career, Browning finally achieved the long- turies: Jochanan ben Zakkai, Jochanan ben Napcha, and the
sought success and popularity which he had been desperately Jehudah “The Holy One” Hanassi, the compiler of the Mishna
striving for since Pauline of 1833. In 1868, at the age of 56, (Berlin-Lieberman, 1934, p. 55).
he publishes The Ring and the Book to wide critical acclaim
and is presented the following year to queen Victoria. No References
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